Continuous Deployment with FAKE and Octopus Deploy

It’s a nice day today, and I’ve just sat outside for a short break while the other guys ate their lunch (I don’t eat during the day, mostly). It struck me that I’ve not been blogging much of late, and that I’ve managed to use my lunch times to get some content out on the web before; so I’m back at my desk and hammering rake new_post again.

So in recent-ish times I’ve been evaluating Octpus Deploy:

If you’re in the business deploying web/service based .NET systems to Windows environments - do yourself a favour and take a look; I think it is a really sound product.

F# Service Stack using Mono and NGinx

Man am I busy right now! I’ve a todo list a mile long. Mosty self-inflicted, and entirely a life choice for me. I can’t (won’t, rather) go into it all - most of it has more to do with life than cutting code or lifting weights (not that I’m doing much of the latter, I can tell you!).

One thing that I have been doing is messing around with Service Stack some more - obviously using F#. Very nice.

There is a little guide for running Service Stack with fastcgi, mono hosted on nginx. But getting that up and running felt a little dirty.

So I needed to find some homeless guy to help me out…

F# WSDL Type Provider and untrusted SSL certificates

I came across something of a pain while using the Microsoft Wsdl Type Provider (Microsoft.FSharp.Data.TypeProviders.WsdlService) at work yesterday.

The problem that I was facing was that the Wsdl Type Provider just would not play ball with one of our web services. The reason as it turns out was the fact that it used https and the certification isn’t properly signed.

So when working with the Type Provider in code - using the default method of just pointing at the service’s Wsdl; just doesn’t do the trick. Documentation for a fix was a little thin on the ground - and it wasn’t until I did a #fsharp shout out on Twitter that I got some clues.

Fake it until you make it!

This is a post that I’ve had floating around in my head for a long time. The title might be a little misleading, but I hope that the content remains somewhat relevant to it in some ways (that will hopefully become clear as you read through).

I want to talk (write?) about how similar powerlifting (or any strength sports, I guess) is to software development.

“You must be mad!”, you’re thinking. You might be right.

Read on if you dare care.

Code Comparison: C# v.s. F#

Since I found using yesterday’s lunchtime to write a blog post so good - I’m following that up with another lunchtime blog post.

Yesterday I continued what I think will slowly become something of an anecdotal series on adopting F#, in which I briefly talked about a new service I’d worked on using F# (see Adopting F#, Part II).

Inspired by ‘Does the language you choose make a difference?’ by simontcousins I’m throwing up a comparison of lines of code.

Adopting F#, part 2

This post has been a long time coming. I’ve a few floating around in various draft states and some that exist only in my head at the moment. But I’ve decided to use today’s lunchtime to try and drive this one home.

I’ve previously talked about my journey so far with adopting F#, and have decided that as things for me have moved on some since then; it was worth me writing a follow-up.

So what has changed since January?

• Written a new web service in F# and seen it deployed to a production environment
• Spent a day doing some pair-programming to help a colleague learn some more about F#
• Written a few more F# ETL processes that help us slice-and-dice data and move it around
• Written a couple of very little tools in F# that help automate and/or provide self-serve functionality to others.

An agile process improvement braindump

At work, I’m trying (where I can) to help push process improvement all the time. When things are slow, inefficient and painful I get grumpy. I’m not the only one, and I have the privilege to work with some great people with great minds and ideas. Together we are making, and have made some good progress.

I’ve been meaning to write something about continuous integration and/or delivery, agile methods etc. General development/software processes etc. How to do things right. But I don’t think I am yet qualified to write with any authority on these subjects - so I am going to settle for this…

Adopting F#, part 1

A second blog post of the day? Barely - I ran rake new_post at 23:59. Odd. Anyway…

I’ve been thinking a little about my foray into the world of function programming, specifically F# - and thought it might be potentially useful to others how *I* have progressed from knowing nothing; to the point that I (and others) feel confident that I can ship production code in the work place using the language.

I’m not really going to cover the following:

• Benefits of Functional Programming & F#
• How-2-F#

…largely because there are a great many resources out there for those that want to know more about what it all is, why you should care and how you go about learning it. A great starting place for that sort of information is the F# Software Foundation.

What I will focus on is how I’ve gone from the point of learning, to the point of using.

#IWDev 4

The 4th #IWDev meet-up happened a week ago tonight. Checkout my write-up in the local online media:

#IWDev 3

So I’ve been a little quiet for a while now. There have been good reasons - life has just got really really busy again. One of the things keeping me on my toes is #IWDev (Isle of Wight Developers). One (code enthused) night I thought to myself - hell there are a whole bunch of web and software guys on the Isle of Wight (where I live and work); but we barely ever talk, we barely ever meet and we almost never work on anything together.

So I spawned #IWDev to help with that. Starting with a new Facebook group, hash-tag on Twitter (#IWDev, obviously) - and then promoted it through word of mouth. I almost immediately planned our first “get together” in a typical English pub to socialize and network… and see if the members wanted to take it somewhere.